Maybe I'm Imagining Things
by teh liz
Summary: [anyonealive challenge] Mark feels things start to collapse around him, and he's losing his sanity and Collins although they're the same thing these days.


_Go see the movie. This piece was written for the Anyone Alive challenge on LiveJournal (_http/ where participants chose a random number and then were assigned a corresponding rare Rent pairing to write a fic of 500+ words. This was mine. Please enjoy it. (Oh yeah. Rent is not mine, it's Johnathan Larson's. If you think it's mine, you're crazier than I am.)

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When Collins announced that he was moving up to Massachusetts to teach at MIT, Mark was nearly at the end of his rope. Roger and April tried and failed to hide their growing addiction and really only seemed to talk to each other outside of the pleasantries to their other roommates. Roger had been missing band rehearsals and gigs and after each one the phone calls roll in, most of them angry. April been missing more and more classes and now she's about to be kicked out of the university and Mark's not even sure she cares.

And then of course there was Maureen, his girlfriend, who claimed she loved him (he was fairly positive he was in love with her – her energy, her love for art of all kinds, a zealous streak that brought out his own, normally absent one, and getting laid on a fairly regular basis didn't hurt things either) but still flirted with anything that would sit still long enough (or get up and dance with her). He couldn't be mad at her for long. Oh, he'd try for awhile, but in the end her smile and pleading would be too much and he'd forgive her for the eleventy millionth time or whatever it was.

"I shouldn't allow you to go," Mark said, seated on the table.

"I'm pretty sure MIT has veto power over you, Mark," Collins said, filling a last box with books – this is the fifth of its kind. Collins could live with very little else in the way of material things, but he had to have his books.

"I shouldn't," he repeated, picking up a stray volume of Kant that had landed on the table. Maybe Collins had been reading it at breakfast with his Captain Crunch (thirty-one going on ten, that was Collins), and perhaps it's been sitting there for weeks. Mark thumbs through it, but the words passed senselessly in front of his eyes, none of them sinking into his brain. "Things are totally going to shit around here, in case you hadn't noticed," he pointed out.

"So they were down awhile ago, and then they were up, and now they're down again. The wheel will turn again and then things will look up," he replied sagely, rearranging books inside the box – they all have to fit in this one.

"The _what?_" Mark's fingers itched for his camera, to capture these grains of wisdom on film, so he could watch them when he left Maureen in some guy's lap at a club, or when Roger or April were being unbearable.

"The wheel. Fortune's wheel. It's really a bit of an ancient concept," Collins stops packing for a moment to impart. "We're all on Fortune's wheel, and the wheel turns, so that sometimes we're on the top and other times we're on the bottom."

"So where the hell are we?" Mark asked.

"That's the funny thing, you can't really tell. On the top, on the bottom…"

"Sounds like sex with Maureen," Mark muttered.

Collins howled with laughter at that, and it made Mark feel good. Such a paltry phrase for the big feeling he had, but… he felt good for making Collins laugh. "Seriously, what am I going to do here?"

"Make your films, become outrageously successful and lend your old friend Collins some cash?" was the suggestion from the philosopher.

"Seriously," Mark said, frowning slightly. "Roger and April are getting pulled under into something that's… well, it's definitely not good, and Maureen and I…" Mark faltered, looking at the floor. 

"What about 'Maureen and I'?" Collins asked gently.

"Maureen and you? I didn't think your door opened that way," Mark attempted a weak joke, which unfortunately fell flatter than a pancake.

"Well, what about it?" Collins asked, ignoring the joke. He approached and took the Kant from Mark, drawing his attention.

"We… it's nothing," he said after a moment. They'd fought that morning, although it wasn't really a fight. It was Mark asking a question in his very roundabout way about whether she had or had not given a handjob to the unidentified man (he assumed it was a man) in the bar. She'd asserted (very loudly, waking the rest of the loft occupants) her independence and left with her usual infuriating and _completely hot_ dramatic flair, but she'd be back later all "I'm sorry, Marky."

She always was. "Nothing," he repeated, sighing and leaning over. That combined with the fact that he was going nowhere and the rent was due and there was essentially no money. Not enough to cover rent, anyway, and now Mark was losing his sanity _and_ Collins – although they were essentially the same things these days.

Suddenly, Collins had Mark in an embrace. Not a brotherly embrace, there was a difference Mark didn't know how to identify, and so tried to ignore it as he put his arms around him in return. "Be their glue," Collins told him.

"I'll get tired of being glue," Mark sighed, his heart beginning to beat faster – from fear, perhaps. Maybe no so much fear as pure and utter dread. Yeah, definitely dread, he was getting that feeling in the pit of his stomach, too. "I'm already tired of it." _If they don't care, why should I?_

"Then be cement," he replied, pulling back and looking Mark in the eye.

He didn't want to. Dear _god_ Mark had never wanted to not let go of anything or anyone so badly in his entire life. "What, like, rubber cement, contact cement, cement cement?" he said, a bit stupidly.

"Whatever holds everyone together," Collins said with a wry smile.

Half a second later, the door burst open, and made them look. "Mark," Maureen started.

"Er. Maureen," he replied, feeling incredibly awkward without knowing why.

She immediately came forward and jumped on him – on him, not jumped him, although it was to come. "I'm sorry," she said, and then pulled back. He looked at her, and she smiled her hopeful little smile, lighting the angel face. "You know me," she told him.

Mark caught a look at Collins over Maureen's shoulder, and not only felt the slight despair of a frustrating pattern he continually fell into and was falling into again, but a missing part of himself he wasn't even sure he'd had to begin with. It was maddening. "I do know," he said.


End file.
